Buildings, in particular office, condominium or apartment buildings, which use various telecommunications systems, computer networks, or building operations systems, such as fire monitoring or surveillance systems, often rely on intricate patchworks of cables to interconnect the components within these systems and networks. Appropriate interconnection of cables locally within the building, for example an Ethernet, telephone, or building operational system are often centralized at one or more hubs, which allow installation, modification or removal of cable connections within these systems.
In many applications, such cabling is mounted on one or more patch panels on a building wall, rack or electrical enclosure, such as a wall mount cabinet, as a multi-dwelling unit/multi-tenant unit (MDU/MTU) solution to route high speed internet and other data voice communications lines to the various units through the hub. Such enclosures have various dimensions, but are often one or more standardized sizes, such as a 14″, 19″, or 23″ wide enclosure of a given depth. Typically, various patch panels are mounted directly or indirectly, such as through a standoff, to a back wall of the enclosure in a single layer.
Although connections within such an enclosure are expandable by addition of extra patch panels to the back wall or enclosure, there has been a practical limit for expansion due to the fixed surface area of the back wall. Thus, when the surface area becomes filled, future expansion is not possible without the addition of extra cabinet enclosures.
Typical commercial mini patch panels for such applications have taken the form of flat units that mount directly or indirectly to the back wall of the cabinet enclosure.